Today's consumer desires to have a personalized appearance which includes a consumer's hair. Many consumers prefer to have hair coloration reflect an appearance of younger age. Also, regardless of age, consumers often want to experiment with hair shades different than their natural color. A variety of hair colors and bleaches may be used in salons and at home to achieve a plurality of effects on a consumer's hair color. Therefore, a wealth of hair care products exists to vary hair color, and lighten selected strands. The selected coloration may be used to accent certain hair styles and subsequently the overall appearance of a consumer. Often this is achieved by multi-tonal or contrasting effect of the hair color.
In practical terms, achieving multi-tonal effects may involve dyeing and highlighting hair. Hair dyeing or bleaching which may involve altering the overall color of the hair, usually requires application of a hair dye or bleach for a period of time followed by a rinse to remove the dye or bleach. During highlighting, the color of groups of selected hair strands may be altered to provide a multi-tonal or contrasting effect which creates a desirable appearance and gives the hair an illusion of volume. For example, a highlighter, a hair bleach, or a hair dye may be applied to portions or strands of the hair to achieve a lightening of those portions.
Multi-tonal effects may be provided in a salon. In the salon, strands may be segregated for highlighting before an overall color is applied. The labor intensive nature of multi-tonal effects usually renders a relatively expensive salon treatment. Home dye treatments are a less expensive alternative to salon treatments. However, home dye treatments may result in a look that is drastic in that the hair becomes substantially a single color all over with very few shade distinctions. Similarly, home highlighting kits are difficult and imprecise to use and may result in a relatively drastic lightening of the hair or may provide unnatural effects. This is because dyeing and highlighting are particularly difficult to be executed satisfactorily without assistance. These applications, in view of the relatively irreversible effects they product, must occur carefully and precisely.
In order to prevent such drastic results in home dye treatments, hair treatment applicators have been developed to allow a user to apply a hair product more precisely and evenly from root to tip without assistance. These applicators range from cap and hook type devices, brushes, wands, clips, combs, and fingertip applicator like devices, which are either supplied separately or are designed to be attached to the hair treatment composition bottle. None of these known applicators are particularly satisfactory. The cap and hook method requires the consumer to place an aperture cap over the hair and then to select and move hair strands which are to be subjected to the hair treatment through the apertures with a hook. Such an application is not easy to manage, especially unassisted. Home highlighting kits frequently do not include foils and therefore cannot be used effectively to create the multi-tonal look. The foils used by professionals protect the rest of the hair from color bleeding, by folding the colored strand of hair inside the foil once the color is applied. But for a home user it is quite difficult and time consuming to attach and fold foils, especially in the back of the head. Without the use of foils in the home highlighting kits, the different shades of color bleed over from the one colored strand to another colored strand, with unattractive and unintended results.
The brushes, wand, clips, combs, and fingertip applicator devices may require the consumer to load the device with the hair product and then apply the hair product along the length of a selected hair strand, reloading as required. The comb devices may have a chamber to load a predetermined quantity of the hair product. The comb and bottle devices may require simultaneous squeezing of the bottle to release the treatment composition while combing the hair. These applicators require the consumer to personally determine the width of the hair strand to be treated and to separate it from the rest of the hair. Alternatively, only a predetermined strand width selection can be treated and strand separation is not required, thus precluding any variation. Finally, it is highly undesirable that any contamination of the untreated remaining hair with the self-applied hair treatment composition occurs.
Also, current applicators may not provide consumers with the ability to control the width of the hair strand to which hair coloration product is being applied. If such control is provided, the applicator may not provide the consumer with the ability to reproduce such a desirable width consistently, and as such, hair strands of varying widths will be dyed or highlighted.
While some consumers may be reasonably satisfied with the end result achieved with the currently available products, due to the time and effort required as well as the inconsistent results, many consumers still want a better home product to supplement the services offered by professional hair salon stylists in order to attain the desired result.
It is important to note that consumers may desire to apply many other hair styling products, including those not associates with dyeing or coloring hair, where a particular style or benefit is needed or desired on a segmented section of the hair. For instance, some consumers may wish to bleach the hair or some may desire to create a temporary effect, such as a glitter, on a desired segment of hair. Also, some consumers may desire to apply a styling product or conditioner, among many other hair products, on a desired segment of hair.
While several systems and methods have been made and used for applying hair product, it is believed that no one prior to the inventor(s) has made or used the invention described in the present application.